Empires, Nations, and Natives Anthropology and State-Making

Benoit de L'Estoile, Federico G. Neiburg, Lygia Sigaud

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Publisher's Synopsis

Empires, Nations, and Natives is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the interplay between the practice of anthropology and the politics of empires and nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It brings together essays that demonstrate how the production of social-science knowledge about the "other" has been inextricably linked to the crafting of government policies. Subverting established boundaries between national and imperial anthropologies, the contributors explore the role of anthropology in the shifting categorizations of race in southern Africa, the identification of Indians in Brazil, the implementation of development plans in Africa and Latin America, the construction of Mexican and Portuguese nationalism, the genesis of "national character" studies in the United States during World War II, the modernizing efforts of the French colonial administration in Africa, and postcolonial architecture.

The contributors-social and cultural anthropologists from the Americas and Europe-report on both historical and contemporary processes. Moving beyond controversies that cast the relationship between scholarship and politics in binary terms of complicity or autonomy, they bring into focus a dynamic process in which states, anthropological knowledge, and population groups themselves are mutually constructed. Such a reflexive endeavor is an essential contribution to a critical anthropological understanding of a changing world.

Contributors: Alban Bensa, Marcio Goldman, Adam Kuper, Benoît de L'Estoile, Claudio Lomnitz, David Mills, Federico Neiburg, João Pacheco de Oliveira, Jorge Pantaleón, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lygia Sigaud, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Florence Weber

ISBN:	9780822336280
Publisher:	Duke University Press Books
Imprint:	Duke University Press
Pub date:	15 Nov 2005
DEWEY:	306.2
DEWEY edition:	22
Language:	English
Number of pages:	340
Weight:	640g
Height:	241mm
Width:	158mm
Spine width:	25mm